Development of Doom | Hacker News Reader

Development of Doom

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74 pointsmichaelpinto26 comments

Dave Taylor, whom the article calls the "spackle coder" is a really brilliant and interesting guy. He was my roommate for awhile and I heard some fascinating stories (he did the sound engine for Quake which involved a lot of time spent with Trent Reznor). My favorite was when I asked him what kinds of (presumably brutal) music everyone was listening to during the creation of Doom. The most commonly listened-to artist: Sarah McLachlan.

What's amazing to me is that both Doom and the first web server were created on NeXT workstations. It's also interesting to see that while everyone a few years ago was rushing to learn Objective-C that Carmack was coding with it in 1992. Looking back on it maybe Steve Job's "lost years" were in fact his most productive (especially given that Pixar made Toy Story during this era).

Indeed. Oversimplifying a bit, modern Apple is largely NeXT stuff running on more affordable hardware. NeXT was very forward thinking, so this is far from a criticism to Apple.

This is a pattern I've spotted quite often, interesting ideas brilliant people have but that can only be executed many years later, when technology catches up.

I highly recommend the book Masters of Doom. Great writing and such a great story.

I wish I could go back and read that book for the first time again.

It's on Audible as well, narrated by Wil Wheaton. I've been doing a lot of driving recently and it was a fantastic listen.

I finally read it last year and I agree it's excellent. One of the best non-fiction books I've read.

PS that was what inspired me to post, i just finished the book and started to wonder what language did he code that in?

It also changed my perception of both John Carmack and John Romero. The latter sometimes gets picked on for not being the engine guy and for Daikatana, but Johnwas writing level editors, compression apps, and massive amounts of tooling work allowing Carmack to focus exclusively on the engine. He also waded through a flooded lake to get to work one day.

I used to see Sandy Petersen from time to time at roleplaying games conventions, in the UK and Germany. He had a black t-shirt withe the DOOM logo on the front and "Wrote it!" On the back.

Almost obligatory, fabians code reviews [1] are a joy to read (even if you spend most of your time in Matlab).

[1]: http://fabiensanglard.net/

In light of the current 'Blurred Lines' lawsuits, how did id ever get away with basically ripping of Metallica for the Doom soundtrack?

That sounded odd to me, so I looked it up: http://doom.wikia.com/wiki/Doom_music

It's been awhile, but I don't recall DOOM music reminding me of Metallica. I guess I only hear E1M1 in my memory though.

Did you have any particular tracks in mind for comparison?

Master of Puppets is one IMHO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdbXIUCUb20

(Slayer and Pantera, too. See http://doom.wikia.com/wiki/Doom_music for one plausible breakdown of "inspirations". The "Bobby Prince is a Filthy Thief" compilation, too: http://www.doomworld.com/linguica/doomcovers/)

The soundtrack didn't make a huge amount of money, and wasn't highly visible, would be the real reasons, as far as I can see. Also, arguably, the Blurred Lines lawsuit sets a new precedent for this kind of thing.

The story goes that Bobby Prince, being a lawyer, knew just how much he could copy without infringing, but that seems pretty tenuous in some of these cases.

"Doom and Metal/Rock: A Comprehensive Comparison"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4H3BB2gKKeY

The guy that made the music (Bobby Prince) was a lawyer, so I bet he knew exactly what you could and couldn't get away with.

In 1993, no one would have cared about a MIDI soundtrack for a computer game sounding vaguely similar to a few thrash metal tracks.

They ripped off Dick Dale too.

Here's a great video recorded at id Software in November of 1993 by Dan Linton, a visiting BBS operator: https://vimeo.com/4022128

Around a month later, the first public version of Doom was uploaded to the BBS that Dan Linton ran.

Nice Machinima documentary about id Software - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JCafnH_eisA

I clicked the link thinking it was about a new development methodology...

The tools were developed in ObjC, but the game engine itself was coded in C.

The source is on GitHub: https://github.com/id-Software/DOOM

> https://github.com/id-Software/DOOM/blob/master/linuxdoom-1....

One thing that's clear when reading game source code is that they hard code a lot more than I would writing system or application software. That's to be expected given the nature of the beast, but it's still one of the first obvious differences.

And this also perfectly explains why computers don't feel exponentially faster than 20 years ago. We're always taught to add abstractions all the time.

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